Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim North India

Anna Bigelow

Abstract

Sacred and civic spaces in religiously plural communities are peacefully shared all the time, yet we rarely hear about such places. This book is a finely grained study of Malerkotla, an Indian town where Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu have coexisted for centuries and attended the same sacred site: the tomb shrine of the Sufi saint who founded the settlement. Situated in Punjab, the region most severely affected by the violence of India’s partition and independence, the town of Malerkotla illuminates the microstrategies of accommodation that make overall congenial interreligious relations possible. Th ... More

Sacred and civic spaces in religiously plural communities are peacefully shared all the time, yet we rarely hear about such places. This book is a finely grained study of Malerkotla, an Indian town where Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu have coexisted for centuries and attended the same sacred site: the tomb shrine of the Sufi saint who founded the settlement. Situated in Punjab, the region most severely affected by the violence of India’s partition and independence, the town of Malerkotla illuminates the microstrategies of accommodation that make overall congenial interreligious relations possible. This study highlights the roles of shared sacred sites, social spaces, and collective memories in grounding the experiences of residents and visitors and forging a shared vision of Malerkotla as a zone of peace and as an idealized example of Indian secularism. It emerges that peace is a process requiring a great deal of work. This book explores how local explanations for the harmony of Malerkotla provide windows into the daily practice of congenial group life in a diverse community. Through these windows we see how the stories Malerkotlans tell themselves and those that others tell about Malerkotla combine to generate an explanatory web that both makes sense of the anomalous peace during Partition and provides a basis for continuing community engagement and interreligious harmony. Malerkotla thus becomes an object lesson in how a complex multireligious society is imagined, produced, and perpetuated.

End Matter

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